Viewing posts from: Visual arts

THE GROTESQUE INFANTS OF THE REVOLUTION

Neo N.O.B. Ivan Fijolić, Lauba, May 1^st – 26^th, 2012

By: Bojan Krištofić

During the declarative commemoration of a few of the existing domestic antifascist holidays, the most influential media and government organs nearly never mention the following fact: in the whirlwind of war and conversion, 2965 monuments of the National Liberation War were ruthlessly ruined in Croatia, some manually, others by explosives, while the political will to appropriately punish the “unknown” vandals was never present then, in the early 1990s, and it mainly isn’t present today either.  Only some of these monuments have been restored, and, among them, one of the undoubted masterpieces of domestic postwar sculpting – Augustincic’s amazing monument of Marshall Tito in his birth town of Kumrovec.  This work of art, which was created in the short-lived phase of rigid Yugoslav socialist realism (from 1945 to 1949), which died down with the breaking of close relations with the USSR, has long since overcome the stylistic obstacles of statehood art, and it has maintained an undeniable aesthetic legitimacy.  The infamous fate of the monument after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is one of those tragic metaphors that symbolically sums up the essence of the breakup of Yugoslavia.  When looking at this as a whole, in the past twenty years, all the antifascist monuments of various stylistic characteristics (from social realism to the modern abstract) have been regarded as disturbances by political nomenclatures, or, in best-case scenarios, as a necessary evil, as fossils of a buried time which is associated with riots, skirmishing, and outbursts of hate, and, sometimes, physical violence as well.  Very few people, however, rarely uncompromisingly oppose violence against our valuable cultural heritage.

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